There is soothing music playing in Vickie Garcia's office. The sort of music, I told her, that might be playing somewhere people are encouraged to relax. That seems slightly incongruous with the job. Vickie is chief financial officer for Española Public Schools, and while the music stays calm, there are days when everything beneath it is moving furiously. "Every single day," she said.

School finance will do that. It isn't simply money coming in and money going out. Public schools operate through specialized fund accounting, with different pools of money designated for different purposes. A district can have money in one fund and still be unable to use it for something needed somewhere else. Grants appear. Grants disappear. Federal programs expire. Rules change. Fund numbers even get repurposed. And while everyone is learning what changed, people still need to be paid. "Things don't stop," Vickie said. "It's relentless."

She would know. Vickie has spent her entire career in education and has worked as a CFO since around 2013, across multiple school districts, charter schools, and regional education cooperatives. She arrived in Española on July 1, which has added its own challenge; many other people are new too, which means some institutional knowledge left the building along with those who departed. Vickie is learning the district while helping keep it moving. I suggested it might be a little like rebuilding an airplane while it's still in flight. "Yes," she said. "That's absolutely right."

But numbers, funds, and financial systems aren't really what Vickie thinks the work is about. Students are. Vickie grew up in Leadville, Colorado, high enough in elevation that a history teacher of hers used to joke that "only abnormal people live above 10,000 feet,” and remembers having a wonderful public-school experience herself. She wants that for Española's kids. "I want to do that for every student here," she said. "Give them the opportunities that they can learn something different, try something." Maybe they'll discover something they love for the rest of their lives. Maybe they won't. The important thing is having the chance to find out. "If they never have the opportunity, that's the part that I work hard for."

That makes a CFO something more than the person protecting the numbers. She's protecting possibilities: a welding program, a music class, a new experience, a teacher, something a child hasn't encountered yet and therefore can't possibly know will matter. Vickie sees that play out already in a teacher she'd heard about just the day before, a district graduate who left, could have gone almost anywhere, and came back instead to rebuild a program he once loved. She sees something bigger in that than one good hire. Too many small New Mexico communities, she said, lose their most talented people for good, not because those people don't want to come home, but because there's often nothing there to come home to. When a graduate does return and finds a real way to contribute, it isn't small. It's the exception rural communities need more of.

Vickie's own connection to Española runs deeper than her July starting date suggests. Her father was from New Mexico, and her grandmother lived here; growing up in Leadville, her family made summer trips to the Valley, five-hour drives she still remembers clearly. Then they'd arrive. "It was so warm all the time," she remembers. "The atmosphere, I don't know, it was just very comforting to me." After Vickie graduated high school, her parents moved to Española themselves. Later, Vickie lived nearby too, close enough that her parents could help with her own children when they were small. Her father eventually became ill, her parents moved to Denver, and he later passed away there. But the family's home remained here. So did the memories. "It kind of feels like home," Vickie said.

Now she's returned in a different role, helping steward the resources of a school district serving a place that's been part of her family's story for generations. It's difficult work. Vickie says school CFOs are becoming harder to find; the responsibility is enormous and the days can be exhausting. The music helps. She describes herself as naturally calm anyway, a useful disposition when invoices, payroll, budgets, grants, and deadlines all arrive faster than anyone can comfortably manage them. At the end of some days, her prayer is wonderfully simple. "Thank you, Lord, for letting me make it through the day." Then she comes back and does it again, because underneath every spreadsheet is something a spreadsheet can't really express: a child, an opportunity, a possibility that wasn't there before. Vickie knows the numbers matter. She also knows exactly what they're for.